Re: "DH says I've turned him into a chauvinist."

[ItsGraceAgain]

Insight & guidance required, please!

Your replies to that thread in Relationships really made me think about how far behind the times I may be? Can you paint some pictures for me, please?

I'm hot on the fundamental issues - despite (or, perhaps, because of) my oppressive upbringing and resultant choice of crappy partners. Truth is, though, the majority of my school friends have either settled in a kind of statusy/role-delimited/wealthy compromise or are, like me, serially divorced. I'm not at all sure my generation (I'm 55) knows what to expect - for our daughters, neices & granddaughters, or for ourselves.

I'm not diminishing the effects of my abusive family but, at the same time, suspect such abuse of daughters was exceptionally common during my time - when women began demanding equality, and society's 'works' tried to demolish the spanner thrown in by feminists.

I can do you a fantastic evaluation of corporate oppression, and even advise a younger woman on strategies to push against it. Choosing between two female candidates, I'd always select the feistier & more political. Like other Mumsnet "witches", I'll spot a dicatorial spouse & try to gentle his wife into thinking for herself.

All the above is, for me, a political and life-saving imperative. Thinking about the personal, I realise I have NO real-life, real-time models of an equal relationship between man & woman. That is, perhaps, both a victory and a curse on my generation. We taught girls & boys to think harder (and to accept emotional drivers) but we were not in a position to do that for ourselves.

Any input? Thoughts?
Thanks.

Sounds like you've got a fantastic future ahead of you bertie

Going to uni is a great thing to be doing - and you will meet loads of new people as the you that you are now IYSWIM. Will be brilliant.

Hmm, I regret that I'm still "working out what an 'equal' and 'no power games, no mind games' relationship looks like"! The business of mind-games was, I think, so much a part of my existence that I was unaware of what was happening. I've been a classic example of those women in Relationships, who have to be shown very gently that they're suffering abuse. I only discovered emotional abuse 3 years ago: it made sense of enormous chunks of my existence.

I became a feminist instantly when, at 16, I read my first article by Germaine Greer (in Cosmpolitan!) The discovery of emotional abuse was, for me, the same kind of epiphany. I've seen how effectively my feminism has been used against me - particularly by partners - and am constantly seeing how other women are manipulated away from the evils of independent (feminist) thoughts: not only by their partners, but by other women as well.

I feel explosively, impotently angry about everyday sexualisation/genderisation of children, and about those idiotic outfits that girl singers have to wear in their videos. Why do little girls ALL wear pink ALL the time? Who decided girls would no longer wear dungarees & climb trees? I'm furious that house-husbands have disappeared from the soap commercials, and equally cross that men now have to use three kinds of anti-ageing moisturiser, just like women!

All this feeds into a reversionist picture of gender roles and expectations, the only observable advances being that women now do DIY as well - and men need an extra half an hour in the bathroom. Without mumsnet, I genuinely do not know where I'd find information & models for how an equally beneficial relationship might work; that's despite being an aged, experienced, information-hungry feminist. How much hope is there for the 22-year-old down the road, with 3 kids, no GCSEs and a drunk husband? As somebody posted, there's nobody telling her how life could be different.

Sorry for the jumbled ramble. My thoughts & feelings are crystallising in unexpected ways at the moment: decades late, but I'm so grateful for what I am learning. Trying to fit it all together scrambles the old brain sometimes ...

I hope that didn't sound smug, Grace.
I feel that I should point out DH and I can have a right old set-to sometimes, but (oddly) the nice thing about our fights, when we have them, is that they're never premised on "women should/are" or "men should/are" - it's premised on "I'm upset with you for x reason." Which is refreshing.

I've been thinking a lot about this thread - one of the things that being pg has done is shift the balance of our relationship a bit. DH had to do more for me when I was sick and tired in the first trimester, for example, and he's carrying a lot more shopping as I waddle around puffing up the stairs to our flat. Occasionally I do freak out that we're not 'equal' any more because he's having to do more 'taking care of me' and omg omg therefore he will find me 'needy' or 'clingy' and all those other things girls are told NOT to be, and OMG omg omg he'll get fed up.

I had a full-scale freak about this around 26 weeks, I think. Then I remembered, eventually, that (1) these voices inside my head are coming from instilled patirarchal ideas that women exist to serve/help men and are otherwise BAD WOMEN; rather than reflecting the truth of our relationship which is that partners help each other out and (2) I actually quite like being able to take care of HIM when he needs it, it's just a loving, nurturing response, and (3) he's so excited about this baby that he thinks it's awesome I'm willing to go through pregnancy and childbirth so we can have a family, and that's why he doesn't mind if I can't get up off the sofa and just need him to bring me a drink.

I definitely haven't got it All Figured Out, is my point. I struggle with the Patriarchy On My Shoulder, and I know DH does too. When we are short of money (which seems like always) I KNOW he can hear the P.O.M.S. telling him he's a bad husband and will be a bad father because he can't 'provide' for us all on just his income - how unfair a burden is that? And I remind him that I married a partner, not a meal ticket - and we work it out. We talk it out. I've started to get better at recognizing the P.O.M.S. for what it is: an evil voice from a toxic system that doesn't reflect what we want from our relationships or how we want to live.

I'm also almost certainly not representative of wider society, but here's our modelling of an equal relationship... and as someone else said up-thread, I don't think it is really about whether or not we're representative so much as it is about showing that yes, an equal relationship is not a science fictional concept.

DP and I both work full-time currently, though I'll be on mat leave from mid-August and am looking forward to it. We share the housework pretty evenly, though some MN-insipred conversations have highlighted that I probably do a bit more overall. He's spontaneously doing more round the house and I'm doing less as I get more pg, so it's balancing out. Like blackcurrants it's a bit odd feeling "taken care of" because I don't really want to be coddled; but at the same time, realistically I do need some looking after, and hey, this is all a different situation from what it was pre-baby!

As this is our first child we don't yet know how all the childcare stuff will work out - the discussion currently is that we'll try to both work four days a week so that once I go back to work we'll only need a nursery place for three days of the week, but that's still in the future. I earn more than DP so it's not so plausible for me to be a SAHM; if anyone was to stay at home full time it would be more likely to be him, but it probably won't end up working out that way.

As others have said above, I wouldn't have put up with someone abusive or controlling, or at least not as a permanent partner; I did have a relationship for nearly a year with someone who did have some control issues. It took me longer to decide this was not for me precisely because the issues were actually not that bad, and he was a hippy vegan pro-feminist type who was in fact trying quite hard to overcome what had been for him a pretty shitty childhood in many ways.

Context - I'll be 40 in June, have always been a feminist but haven't always known how it might / could work out in personal relationships as well as things like politics and the workplace. I have always known that someone who expected me to do all the cooking and washing up would never be one for me, but then that's just the tip of the iceberg in many ways!

Heartening reading, thank you! It's interesting to hear how the emotional issues impact you, as well as the more obvious practical & financial ones. Love the 'Patriarchy On My Shoulder', blackcurrants

Amongst all the other shit, I need to work out how much of what I want to fix in my personal life is abuse-related, and how much is gender specific. I know Dittany would say it's all gender specific - in the most global terms that would be right, but things translate differently at the interpersonal level imo. Need to think about why. But probably not today.